


The Byway where two Paths become One

by Talimee



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Character Insight, F/M, Gen, Possibly Pre-Slash, Possibly Slash, Slice of Life, Some Plot, not much though, set in the two weeks before Odense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 17:32:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9618005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talimee/pseuds/Talimee
Summary: Adventure, Knowledge and Danger - that was what Tuuri had hoped to find in the Silent World. Predestination though brought her a likeminded companion.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kiraly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiraly/gifts).



> Dear Kiraly,
> 
> I hope you enjoy this little thing. It is not slash yet, but nearly so, and Tuuri even gets to repair stuff!

**The Byway where two Paths become One**

 

The box was _not_ helping.

Well, it helped, of course – she could stand on it and look into the Tank's engine compartment – but the second blessing – getting her feet out of the soaking mud – was so short-lived that she didn't count it at all.

“Point the torch there”, she said to Reynir and directed his hand with her own until the torchlight he was holding shone exactly where she wanted it. Then she stepped down from the box into the freezing slush, moved it about a hand span and climbed up again, leaning over the open compartment, partially suspended by the Tank's frame and partially …

“Move your hand please, I don't want to pinch it.”

“Oh! Sorry!”, Reynir withdrew his hand hastily, nearly dropping his torchlight in the process.

“No need to be nervous”, Tuuri said under her breath, quietly enough that Reynir could choose not to hear it, and was wondering if she was talking to herself. She could do with a bit of calming down. This was the fourth time in as many days that their engine had stopped working because it had become too hot. Something was seriously wrong with the Tank's cooling system and Tuuri couldn't find the problem. It drove her mad with anxiety.

 

“If it's only losing _water_ …”, Emil said next day while leaning casually against the side of the tank and peering into the engine-room. “… why don't we just fill it up again when it's empty? Plenty of water around, y'know?” His thickly gloved hand made a sweep over the slush-and-melting-snow field they were parked upon today.

Tuuri rolled her eyes at his suggestion and called for her cousin instead. “Lalli!” Slipping straight into Finnish she added: “Take your boyfriend away from here and explain to him why we cannot use pond-water in an engine-system before he does something stupid.”

Lalli jogged up to them from around the back of the tank, the puukko he had drawn in case of an emergency well in hand. “What's a –“, he started but Tuuri interrupted him.

“Never mind! Just get him out of my hair. Please?”

Lalli threw her a confused look and sheathed his knife before grabbing Emil's wrist and just towing the stammering and blushing Swede away. Reynir was blushing as well as he watched them go, Tuuri noticed on the fly as she turned back to her work.

“Can't we just refill it with water?”, Reynir suggested a second later.

Tuuri took care to lay her tools down before looking up (So unfair! She stood on a box and Reynir was still a few centimetres taller!) – giving herself time to rearrange her face away from the annoyed frown she just felt slip there: Reynir was a civilian, and a shepherd, he might not know.

“You see”, she started and smiled up into his earnest gaze …

 

“ _Yer see t'white stuff on them tubes?”, the old gaffer in the garage had asked her when the few spoonfuls of water had boiled away under his ministrations with an improvised Bunsen burner. His face had broken into a myriad of creases in a toothless smile when Tuuri nodded. “'s called limescale 'n' builds up pretty fast when yer use normal water in yer coolin' systems. Makes yer tubes porifer's 'n' inflexible.”_

“ _And we don't want that”, Tuuri piped up when he had looked expectantly at her._

“ _Yer's righ' – we don' want that. Yer better use distilled water in yer systems and …?”, he had left the sentence hanging and Tuuri knew what he was waiting for._

“ _Prop'ly maintain your pipes”, she completed._

_Tuuri had felt a surge of pride race through her when the wrinkled face smiled at her again. Then the old gaffer had ignited the Bunsen burner again and had shown her how to roast their lunch-break sausages with it._

 

“Did he teach you all you know?”, Reynir asked in awe later, when she had finished cleaning her tools and putting them away.

Tuuri thought for a second. “A lot of stuff about mechanics and repair-work, also how to cheat at cards, pilfer tools and build non-licensed welding machines.” She was certain he would have taught her how to distil moonshine as well if he hadn't caught his death by pneumonia the winter she turned thirteen.

Reynir seemed shocked for a minute, then said: “That's useful, I guess?”

Despite herself Tuuri laughed at his perplexity. “There's not much welding done on your farm, is there?”, she asked and playfully nudged his side with her elbow. They were seated on the stairs leading up into the Tank's interior, both nursing a cup of watery mint-tea in their hands and had half an eye on what their crew-mates were doing.

“No”, Reynir confirmed after a while. “Not much. I think I never even saw a _real_ machine until we had a school trip to the technology museum two towns over. Most people in our village have sheep or cattle, so there's not even a smithy …”, he finished lamely.

Unbidden, visions of rocky green hills and a flat, open sky came to Tuuri's mind. Nothing between horizon and zenith. If she closed her eyes, she was sure, she could imagine the earthy smells of water and moss and animals. The complete opposite of the ink, grease and hot iron-smells that made up her world.

 

The hot metal fell back with a clang as she sprang away with a curse and stuck her hand under her armpit. The great billowing cloud of steam that had escaped when she had opened the hood, slowly drifted up and apart, looking innocent enough if not for the sting Tuuri felt in her right hand. In hindsight, pulling off her gloves to keep them clean was an idiotic idea, she was ready to admit. Pulling her hand back out and taking a good look at it, she could see however that, apart from a slightly red patch on her wrist, nothing was harmed.

She took the long stick Reynir handed her and carefully levered the hood back up again. When the last billows of steam had vanished she stepped up to the engine compartment and looked in, already dreading what she would see.

“What is it?”

Sigrun's voice next to her made Tuuri jump and jitter nervously.

“I d-don't know yet!”, the skald said in a voice that sounded a good octave higher than normal. Some small inner part of Tuuri rolled her eyes at herself, while the rest frantically calculated if there was any chance that the captain might think that this was not entirely her fault. “It looks as if the cooling-system's out again.”

To her relief Sigrun just groaned and walked away. “Emil!”, Tuuri heard her shout a split-second later. “Where did your uncle find this piece of scrap-metal? The bargain-bin?”

“How would _I_ know?”, came the indignant answer when Tuuri opened the Tank's back-door and reached for her toolbox. She handed it to Reynir, who had trudged along after her, and rummaged around in the spare-parts box.

Only a hand-width of rubber tube left …

 

Tuuri redoubled the grip on her tongs and pulled the gasket tight. Readjusting the tool on the joint, she pulled again and again before righting herself with a sigh.

“There. That should do it”, she said more to herself than to anyone else and was surprised when Reynir's voice piped up.

“Have you found the leaky parts, then?”

Doubtful insecurity and proud craftsmanship had a brief three-sided battle with her conscience.

“I think so. I mean, I must have!”, she said with growing conviction. “I replaced everything I could, even joints that looked brand-new.”

Her look upwards at his face was rewarded with a radiant smile. _Well then_ , his eyes seemed to say, _you have done everything you can._

Tuuri wanted to believe the smile, she wanted to believe that she had dealt with the overheating once and for all. But until she _knew_ that the leakage was properly dealt with she could not relax.

“Life must be so easy in Iceland”, she said wistfully as she packed her tools back into their box and made a mental note to ask Sigrun to look for spare rubber on her expeditions. “Whenever something's broken you just go to a store and buy a replacement.”

Reynir's smile turned apologetic.

“I don't really know”, he said and took the toolbox from her. “We use a lot of stuff made from wood, so, when we need something new we go to Elís. The village's carpenter, I mean.” He waited for Tuuri to unlock the Tank's storage compartment and pushed the toolbox back into its usual place. “Well, last year old Jóhanna needed a new hoe and a watering can for her garden – and she _had them delivered_ in the mail from Ísafjörđur.”

Without so much as a warning Tuuri burst out laughing. She laughed and laughed, doubling over and holding her sides until she could barely breathe any more. Glimpses through her tear-streaking eyes showed her a startled Reynir, an insecure smile on his face and a worried crease to his forehead.

 _He has no idea!_ The things she had known and experienced so far were so utterly, _utterly_ foreign to him. It made her sad and sobered her up faster than she liked.

She closed the door and fell with her back against it. Looking up at Reynir she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand – most certainly leaving smears of grease behind on her face – and said: “I bet you wish you were back home, right?”

To her surprise Reynir shook his head almost instantly and came to lean next to her at the door.

“Not really.” The insecure smile behind his mask was back and Tuuri surprised herself by wishing she could just put her fingers to his lips and wipe it away. “You probably think I'm mental but I really do not regret coming here.”

“Really?”

“Yes!” Reynir's gaze, which had until now rested on her, went away and took a long sweep over the surrounding murky flat-lands with their occasional copses of young birches and knee-high dry grass knolls. “If I was at home I would either muck out the stable or watch our herd wander around the paddock. In a few hours I would bring the sheep in, feed and water them, and then go home and spend the evening doing … I dunno, whatever needed doing on the farm …”

His voice faltered. Maybe he was thinking about his parents and imagined the horror when they had found their youngest child gone; maybe he felt ashamed for abandoning those who had shown nothing but concern and the wish to protect him.

 _No!_ Tuuri shook her head to dislodge these unwanted thoughts. _We are here, this is now. There is no point in dwelling on the past._

Reynir was still speaking.

“In the end, I couldn't bear it any longer! Every day the same work, the same people, the same routine. Always, everywhere, the same.”

“Like a treadmill.”

Only Reynir's enthusiastic agreement made her realize that the last sentence had been said by her. She cleared her throat.

“I mean, it's not like a treadmill _all the time_ , of course”, she clarified. “But … nothing we did had any meaning.” She noticed too late that she had slipped into the familiar _we_ her mind utilized more and more often lately when thinking about Reynir and herself.

Mikkel's call for them broke the spell. They pushed away from the Tank's back door and trudged over to the stove the Dane was setting up to cook dinner.

 

Later, when the food had been distributed, Reynir found her sitting on the small steps again. Scooting to her left, Tuuri made place for him to sit next to her. They ate in silence.

When both their bowls had been emptied and set down he cleared his throat. Tuuri's heart leapt.

“I _am_ glad that I'm here”, he said quietly. “Even though the Silent World is deadly, and even though I have even less freedom of movement now than I had at home.” Looking at him out of the corners of her eyes, Tuuri noticed that he avoided looking at her. Instead he pretended to be interested in his knees which he had pulled up to his chest. The hand nearest to her picked idly at a piece of thread poking out of a seam at his boot. “I can't live my life in the protective bubble my parents have spun around me. It's _my_ life! I don't want to waste it away behind bars, letting routine and caution hold me back until I'm too frail to go into the World and make my mark on it.”

Tuuri's felt as if an invisible fist had punched her. There was nothing to say. There was nothing she could add or clarify. Her mind boggled, her breath caught in her throat, as she realised that this man, this shepherd out of the Icelandic sticks, felt exactly the same way she did.

Where everyone else was calling her mad for following her dreams, he understood.

She pulled her knees up to her chest as well and rested her forehead on them to hide her confusion. The hand nearest to him wandered away from her shin and it's pinky hooked around his index-finger.

He didn't pull away.

She turned her head and looked up at him, caught his eye, saw him blushing and smile. Her heart was in her throat but she pushed her words out around it.

“Let's make that mark together.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> 100 Internet Cookies for the one who spots the very well hidden and heavily altered LotR-quote in here. ;D


End file.
